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Delivered as part of the IBM Informix v15.0 release
This issue has been around for a long time but with trends towards Big Data and just Informix systems being around for longer, dealing with this problem comes up fairly frequently.
There are a few aspects to it. Ideally it would be good to sweep away this limitation entirely but given it is there it presents the following challenges:
Monitoring all tables and table fragments for the page limit and making predictions around when it might be reached based on table growth. I don't think there is anything in InformixHQ to do this, for example. Doing something here seems like the bare minimum to avoid a nasty surprise for the uninitated.
Workgroup edition users cannot use partitioning. This is understandable from the point of view of detach/drop, PDQ, other enterprise features but should not limit table size.
With a 2 kB page size, the unpartitioned table size limit is just 32 GB. Larger page sizes can help but only where the table is wide enough to use large page sizes (avoiding reaching another limit, 255 rows/page).
Range partitioning offers a possible solution, provided table have a suitable interval column, but sizing of the interval must be done carefully.
If the current constraints are not addressed it would perhaps be good to have an advisor of some kind to:
suggest the ideal page size for table.
suggest an interval column and interval size.
a method to easily convert a standard non-partitioned table to range partitioning.
This should take compression into consideration too and perhaps replace the compression estimator.
There could be an easy way to convert tables to range partitioning with minimal changes on disk or alternatively loopback replication could be used.
If the limitation is to be addressed fully, we would not mind a new dbspace type and would not necessarily expect existing dbspaces to automatically be converted or fixed.